Noita

November 13, 2024, 9:45 pm

A couple of my most recent and more spectacular deaths in this amazingly good Roguelike

Google has an AI problem

November 4, 2024, 12:39 am

Over the last twenty years plenty of people have talked about various existential threats to Google's search money machine (Facebook's social graph, competitive privacy focused engines like DuckDuckGo, Regulatory action, etc). It's ironic, given Google's founding role in creation of the technology that drives modern LLMs, that ChatGPT's launch into the search market seems like the first one that might do material damage to Google's share of global search traffic.

Since the launch of ChatGPT I have been trying out "Gemini" (and previously "Bard") and comparing results. I have been consistently underwhelmed. In fact, it's never given me a useful result. This is quite extraordinary given I regularly use ChatGPT for various tasks on a semi-daily basis (writing SQL queries, building skeleton React components etc).

I have a search query which I think qualifies as being in the pointiest end of the long tail of search results. In 1997 Stone Jackal Studios created a sci-fi/fantasy football-esq game called Crush Deluxe. I don't think it was a massive success, but my friends and I really liked it and played it every week for a couple of years. It was a lot lot fun. At some point I decided that the season stats were too limited and thought I could create something to track the data over time and present a whole lot more detail. I reverse engineered the data files and created some tools that did just that. It was a fun project and has been sitting on my website ever since.

As far as I know a Google query for "Crush Deluxe tools" or "utilities" has never served up my site on anything close to the first page (if it comes back at all). Every now and again, over the years, I have checked and my page has never ranked for any terms around "Crush Deluxe". This didn't really bother me, but it was something I was aware of as a limitation to the "pagerank" search paradigm. Probably not a very important limitation, that the very longest long tail search results, with almost no back links or traffic, won't rank, but a limitation nonetheless. This is what you get from Google if you search for "Tools to augment the gameplay for the 90s PC game 'Crush Deluxe'":

With the launch of Search on ChatGPT the other day I thought I would give that query a try and the results were pretty compelling.

Unless there is another developer out there who built a utility to augment Crush Deluxe that has been similarly ignored over the years, mine is objectively the only correct answer to that question.

Giving Gemini the benefit of the doubt I thought I would see if the latest version of tha LLM could match the result. Not surprised to find it doesn't.